BAUHAUSArt as lifeBarbican Art Gallery, until August 12

A
mong the countless exhibits on show in Bauhaus: Art as life at the Barbican
are drawings, prints, paintings, carvings in stone and wood, picture
postcards, books, magazines, photographs, photomontages, collages,
furniture, rugs, posters, puppets, theatre designs, book bindings,
typography, ceramics, metalwork, wallpaper, films, toys and games. Those who
know little or nothing about the Bauhaus may well be confused. How does all
this diverse material hang together? What is the story it is meant to tell?
And how, using visual evidence, documents and short wall texts alone, do you
describe and explain a complex institution which changed location three
times, and had to fight for its existence against the bigotry and violence
of the Weimar Republic? The catalogue isn’t much help, either.

The school accomplished much in its short life, almost precisely as long as
that of the Weimar Republic itself (1919–33). Indeed, both originated in the
Thuringian town of Weimar, where the Constituent Assembly met to draw up a
new, Republican constitution after the war. For the first few years
confusion and shortages reigned at the Bauhaus. This explains the direction
it originally took. By 1925, when the school transferred to the industrial
town of Dessau, it was on its way to becoming a modernist powerhouse. But in
Weimar it was devoted to small-scale handicrafts and had a pronounced
Expressionistic, utopian bent. You could learn bookbinding, stained glass,
pottery and weaving there, the results of which were later derided by the
second director, the architect Hannes Meyer, who dismissed even the carpets
on the floor as “the psychological complexes of young girls”.

There was also a compulsory “preliminary course” of one year which gave
students basic instruction in form, colour and pictorial expression.
Initially directed by the mystic Johannes Itten, a follower of Mazdaznan, a
modern revival of ancient Zoroastrianism, the course had its weird elements
involving diet (masses of garlic), colonic irrigation and physical jerks.
Another teacher of a similar variety was Lothar Schreyer, who created plays
using basic forms, colours, movements and sounds.

Everyone should now work together on a grand project in which every art form from
architecture to weaving would be combined Schreyer at least looked
normal. Itten, on the other hand, habitually dressed in monkish robes and
shaved his head. But his get-up was by no means the only medieval aspect of
the Bauhaus. The full-page woodcut made by Lyonel Feininger for the school’s
founding manifesto, written by Walter Gropius (1919), makes this clear.
Simultaneously Expressionist and medieval, it shows a Gothic cathedral
illuminated by radiant stars. The now celebrated image reflected the medieval
spirit of the Bauhaus. “Fine” artists were no longer the elite, Gropius
asserted in his manifesto. The class distinction between art and craft was
to be removed; and just as all the arts and crafts in the Middle Ages, from
weaving to metalwork, were dedicated to the creation of the Gothic cathedral,
everyone should now work together on a grand project in which every art form
from architecture to weaving would be combined.

The structure of the Bauhaus therefore followed, as Gropius thought, medieval
principles. He coined the school’s name so as to echo the word Bauhütte, in
the Middle Ages the German for a guild of masons, builders and decorators.
And the teaching was based on specialist workshops where you learned your
trade by carrying out actual projects, graduating from apprentice to
journeyman and master. The teachers were at first called Masters and not
Professors, a revolution in a country where academic snobbery was the norm.

Gropius even went through an Expressionist phase himself. War and service at
the front had changed the designer of the modernist Fagus shoe-last factory
at Alfeld-an-der-Leine (1910–11) into the maker of at least one house in
which Dr Caligari would have felt immediately at home. This was the wooden
villa Gropius created in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin for Adolf
Sommerfeld, for which the furniture and fittings were supplied by the
Bauhaus workshops – paid, by the way, in gold marks, an extraordinary
achievement at the height of the inflation. An even better example of
Gropius’s Expressionism is his monument (1921) erected in the Weimar
graveyard to the trade unionists killed during the Kapp putsch. This also
reveals where the political sympathies of the supposedly apolitical Gropius
then lay. (I missed any mention of this in the exhibition.) The first sign
of change at the Bauhaus was Itten’s departure in 1923. He was replaced by
the Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, who wore not monkish robes
but a worker’s overalls and nickel-rimmed spectacles. His dress summed up
his attitude to art and craft, and his teaching, which embraced everything
from typography to metalwork, kinetic art to painting, was multifaceted and
brilliant.

Gropius later found the early phase of the Bauhaus embarrassing and tried to erase
it from the record. He favoured the school’s later passion for
geometry, clean lines, functionalism and new materials. So the Bauhaus
exhibition in 1938 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, only hinted at the
early period. Apart from lots of paintings by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky
and Itten, the last big Bauhaus show in London, in 1968 at the Royal
Academy, was similarly distorted. Bauhaus: Art as life corrects the
imbalance, chiefly by drawing on loans from Weimar of, for example,
totemistic, coloured wooden sculptures, or, from Berlin, a book bound in
tree bark and plant materials, with parts of a mirror and thread. Bauhaus:
Art as life corrects the imbalance

In 1968 Weimar was in the GDR, so it was virtually out of bounds for loans.
Dessau, where the only purpose-built school is located, was also in East
Germany. Now both rich sources have been tapped, as has the Bauhaus Archive
and Museum in Berlin. The loans from Weimar and Dessau are among the most
interesting things in this exhibition. They include examples of weaving by
Gunta Stölzl and Agnes Roghé, stoneware by Theodor Bogler, and any number of
photographs of everyday life at the Bauhaus, especially in Dessau and
Berlin, the school’s last, desperate home.

The exhibition does make it easy to follow the transition from Expressionism
to Constructivism, from handicrafts to industrial design. It also suggests
that for most of its time in Weimar the school was largely an irrelevance,
rescued from historical oblivion by the presence on the staff of Klee and
Kandinsky. This is misleading, as is the impression the exhibition gives
that the Bauhaus sprang fully formed out of nothing. Several of Gropius’s
key ideas – organizing the school around its workshops, for example – were
lifted directly from Henry van de Velde, the brilliant architect, designer
and painter, who was in charge of the School of Arts and Crafts until 1915.
It was this that Gropius took over four years later. The Wiener Werkstätte,
seldom mentioned in this context, were also an important influence,
especially since Alma Mahler, Gropius’s wife, living in Vienna at the time
(with Franz Werfel), provided the necessary link.

If the beginning of the story is disappointingly absent, so is the end, or
rather the continuation of the end. In 1933 the Bauhaus, with Mies van der
Rohe as its third and last director, and by then installed in a disused
telephone factory in the Steglitz suburb in the south-west of Berlin, closed
itself down rather than submit to the political and racist demands of the
Nazi government. (Ironically, the Nazis wanted Kandinsky fired; but the
Russian, who’d experienced the Bolshevik revolution at first hand, had
developed Nazi sympathies.) The staff and students of the Bauhaus therefore
went elsewhere. Contrary to the mythology, however, by no means all of them
fled to the United States. Some chose the Soviet Union. Others emigrated to
Palestine, where they turned part of Tel Aviv into a Bauhaus colony. Some
stayed in Germany. One of these, the great typographer Herbert Bayer,
designed a brochure for an exhibition celebrating life in the Third Reich
and the authority of Hitler until he went west in 1937. Another was Wilhelm
Wagenfeld, creator of the world-famous table lamp, who won the Goethe medal
for design. After the war a few former students worked on the dreadful
Stalinallee in East Berlin.

Not a few, including Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Moholy-Nagy, came to London,
quickly moving on to America. Moholy-Nagy did an enormous amount of work
here. He designed special effects for the film Things to Come (1936); he
directed documentaries, one of them about the mating habits of lobsters off
Littlehampton (1935); he took photographs for the Architectural Review; he
worked for Imperial Airways and became display consultant for the clothing
store Simpsons of Piccadilly, puzzling pedestrians with his abstract
compositions of striped shirts and bowler hats. Meanwhile Gropius, no doubt
hedging his bets, continued to enter German architectural competitions,
never forgetting to include on his drawings a few fluttering Nazi flags. (He
also never missed the annual party for the Fuhrer’s birthday at the German
Embassy, now the British Academy.) More importantly he designed, with
Maxwell Fry, Impington Village College outside Cambridge. He also applied
(unsuccessfully) to be the Rector of the Royal College of Art and was
commissioned to design an extension to Christ’s College, Cambridge. This was
never begun. Modernism was still an exotic import to Britain and Gropius
could be dangerous. Even a designer as masterly as London Transport’s Frank
Pick could dismiss Moholy-Nagy as “a gentleman with a modernistic tendency
who produces pastiches of photographs of a surrealistic type, and I am not
at all clear why we should fall for this”.

The influence of the Bauhaus was enormous; but it wasn’t entirely benign. The
location of this exhibition is enough to prove it. Think about it while
you’re tramping the bleak walkways of the Barbican, trying to find your way
to the gallery. And think of it again while you’re puzzling about where the
exhibition begins and continues.

Frank Whitford is the author of Bauhaus, 1984, and the editor of
Bauhaus: Masters and students by themselves, 1993.